The week’s best online poetry with excerpts, links and (occasional) commentary by yours truly. The week of April 8 features poetry by Stacy Gnall, Jacqueline Berger, Cathy Smith Bowers and Esther Lee.

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• “Self-portrait as Thousandfurs” by Stacy Gnall:

To have been age enough.
To have been leg enough.
Been enough bold. Said no.
Been a girl grown into that
negative construction. Or said yes ….read more at The Academy of American Poets

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• “Why I’m Here” by Jacqueline Berger:

Because my mother was on a date
with a man in the band, and my father,
thinking she was alone, asked her to dance.
And because, years earlier, my father
dug a foxhole but his buddy
sick with the flu, asked him for it, so he dug
another for himself. In the night
the first hole was shelled.….read more at The Writer’s Almanac

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• “The Boxers” by Cathy Smith Bowers

When my father, after twenty years, came home
to die, circling, circling, like an animal
we believed extinct, it was my crazy aunt
who took him in, who told later
how the taxi had dumped him
bleached and whimpering on her porch.….Read more at The Writer’s Almanac

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• “The Real World is Like This:” by Esther Lee

My sister’s bed’s a bird’s nest, all edges,
construction paper. She keeps adding
what she coaxes father to give up
before the police arrive: food stamps, silver
parts of a handgun. If she doesn’t stop, her nest-bed will
soon be too wide to fit through
any doorframe. let alone down the hallway.….Read more at Verse Daily

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